Al Jazeera accused Israel of carrying out a “targeted assassination” after five of its journalists were killed in a strike on Gaza on Sunday, rejecting outright the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) claim that one of the reporters was previously a member of Hamas.
The broadcaster’s well-known Gaza reporter Anas al Sharif, 28, was killed alongside colleagues Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa when their tent near al Shifa Hospital was hit. The Hamas-run government in Gaza said the “brutal and heinous” attack was “premeditated and deliberate,” describing it as “a full-fledged war crime aimed at silencing the truth.”
Al Jazeera slammed the attack as a “targeted assassination” and “yet another blatant and premeditated attack on press freedom.”
“The fact is that the Israeli government is wanting to silence the coverage of any channel of reporting from inside Gaza,” Al Jazeera’s managing editor Mohamed Moawad told BBC World Service show The Newsroom. “This is something that I haven’t seen before in modern history.”
“They were targeted in their tent — they weren’t covering from the front line,” Moawad said of the Israeli strike.
In a statement to Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst, the IDF confirmed the strike but pointed to a spreadsheet released via X last October listing one of the men, al-Sharif, as a member of
Yingst added in his reporting that Israel provided no further evidence of the allegations and pointed to a statement released by al-Sharif arguing he “had no political affiliations.”
In a further statement circulated to the press on Sunday, Israeli officials said al Sharif only “posed” as a journalist and “served as the head of a terrorist cell in the Hamas terrorist organization,” which was “responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), however, said that Israel had failed to provide sufficient evidence for what it said amounted to a “smear campaign” against al Sharif.
“This is a pattern we’ve seen from Israel — not just in the current war, but in the decades preceding — in which typically a journalist will be killed by Israeli forces and then Israel will say after the fact that they are a terrorist, but provides very little evidence to back up those claims,” CPJ’s CEO Jodie Ginsberg told the BBC.
In July, al Sharif told viewers he lived with “the feeling that I could be bombed and martyred at any moment” because his coverage “harms [Israel] and damages their image in the world.”
At least 186 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since 2023, when Israel banned foreign reporters from entering the territory. Israel shut down Al Jazeera operations in the country last year.
Watch